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School Offers Activities for Home-Schooled Students

Posted on: Sunday, 5 March 2006, 18:00 CST

By Dana M. Nichols, The Record, Stockton, Calif.

Mar. 5--SAN ANDREAS - Most public schools around this unincorporated town have flat or shrinking enrollments, a reflection of the dwindling population of school-age children.

Not Mountain Oaks School.

Mountain Oaks, a public charter school operated by the Calaveras County Office of Education, serves home-schooling families. It has gone from 38 students when it opened in 1994 to about 400 today. Demand for admission to the school is so great that administrators have had to cap its annual growth rate to protect the integrity of its programs.

This spring, county school officials expect to call for contractors to bid on the job of building a new $10 million campus that will be shared by Mountain Oaks and Mountain Ranch Community School, another county Office of Education program.

"I've been looking 12 years for a location," said Linda Mariani, one of three educators who share administration duties at Mountain Oaks. Mariani home-schooled her children and has long been an apostle for empowering parents and students to take charge of their education.

Officials are quick to say that Mountain Oaks is not for everyone. Families are admitted only after interviews and careful evaluation. Not all parents have the required 20 hours a week available to teach their children. And some may not have the knowledge and skills to act as teachers.

Families enrolled here, however, rave about the program's ability to keep students focused on growth and study while avoiding some of the social pitfalls of conventional K-12 schools.

"The sports (program) is small, but unlike the public schools, every student that signs up gets to play. And not just once," said Carol Ann Koch, who is home-schooling her daughter Sarah Whitmore, a senior at Mountain Oaks. "They don't do that in the public schools."

John Brophy, Calaveras County's superintendent of schools, said one concern in the early years of the home-schooling movement was that home-schooled children would miss out on the socialization and group activities like sports and music offered at public schools.

Mountain Oaks addresses that concern by offering students sports, clubs, dances and workshops on a variety of topics. The school has teachers to help support families, assess students and find study materials. The school has things an individual family couldn't provide, like laboratory science classes and a library with plenty of computers.

And while students must meet state standards and study certain required subjects, the program is tailored to the interests of individuals.

"I love the fact that you can work at your own pace and the freedom that you have to pick what you are really interested in," said Willow Hampton, 16, a junior at Mountain Oaks. "They don't shove everything down your throat."

Hampton said she is focusing her studies on psychology and plans to eventually work as a psychologist.

Eric Bobrycki, the father of six children enrolled at Mountain Oaks, said he and his wife, Collette, chose home schooling because they wanted to have the closer relationship that comes with spending more time with children. He said Mountain Oaks allows them to do that while still offering the laboratory sciences and extracurricular activities of a conventional school.

"The blend is the best of both," he said.

The new school will look something like a cross between a winery and a college campus. It will rise on Poole Station Road on a 13-acre parcel next to the Performing Animal Welfare Society elephant refuge. The entire cost of building the campus will be paid with state dollars, because the county Office of Education has no mechanism for floating bonds or otherwise raising local construction funding, Brophy said.

Mountain Oaks has kept a low profile through much of its existence. Yet its students now account for almost 6 percent of the 6,700 public K-12 school students in Calaveras County, and it supplies about a third of the county Office of Education's annual operating budget.

"The school just started to grow," Brophy said. "As more people heard about it, they wanted to be involved."

Contact reporter Dana M. Nichols at (209) 754-9534 or dnichols@recordnet.com

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Record, Stockton, Calif.

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Source: The Record

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